This conference is aimed at addressing important aspects of robot control
architectures, with a specific emphasis on distribution, verification and validation,
languages and modeling, and implementation of control architectures. It brings together
researchers and practitioners from universities, institutions and industries, working in this
field. It intends to be a meeting to expose and discuss gathered expertise, identified trends and
issues, as well as new scientific results and applications around software control architectures
related topics, through plenary invited papers.

Theme

Due to their increasing complexity, nowadays intervention robots, that to say those dedicated for instance
to exploration, security or defence applications, definitely raise huge scientific and commercial
issues. Whatever the considered environment, terrestrial, aerial, marine or even spatial, this
complexity mainly derives from the integration of multiple functionalities: advanced perception,
planification, navigation, autonomous behaviours, in parallel with teleoperation or robots
coordination enable to tackle more and more difficult missions.

But robots can only be equipped with such functions if an appropriate hardware and
software structure is embedded: the software architectures will hence be the main concern of
this conference.

As quoted above, the control architecture is thus a necessary element for the
integration of a multitude of works; it also permits to cope with technological advances that
continually offer new devices for communication, localisation, computing, etc. As a matter of fact,
it should be modular, reusable, scalable and even readable (ability to analyse and understand it).
Besides, such properties ease the sharing of competencies among the robotics community, but
also with computer scientists and automatics specialists as the domain is inherently a
multidisciplinary one.

Numerous solutions have been proposed, based on the "classical" three layers architecture
or on more "modern" approaches such as object or component oriented programming. Actually, almost
every robot integrates its own architecture; the workshop will thus be a real opportunity to share
reflections on these solutions but also on related needs, especially standardisation ones, which are
of particular importance in military applications for instance.

Hence, this conference on control architectures
of robots aims at gathering a large number of robotics actors (researchers, manufacturers as
well as state institutions) in order to highlight the multiple issues, key difficulties and
potential sources of advances.